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The Street Sweeper, by Elliot Perlman

January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorated annually on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It seems highly fitting that I finished reading The Street Sweeper (2011) on that day, for much of it concerns events at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Questions about the liberation of Dachau are also important in the plot. The book took me some time to read; I had to put it down and leave it several times because I simply couldn’t go on. Is it the power of the events, or the power of the author in telling them that makes such an impression? The events would speak for themselves whatever the medium; Perlman’s achievement is to make you want to read on.

The book tells a number of stories that belong both to Perlman’s characters, and to the history of the twentieth century. The book is set in New York in the present, but the action often reverts to the past. The two main characters in this vast sweep are Lamont Williams, a young African American man just out of gaol after serving six years for a crime he didn’t commit, and Adam Zignelik, a historian at Columbia University whose personal and professional life is falling to bits. Although unknown to each other, a web of connections links them, made up of people they come into contact with, and things they learn from and about them. The story is much too complicated even to outline here, but it reaches back to the experience of African American soldiers in World War II, to the Warsaw Ghetto, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to unionism in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, to school desegregation and the American Civil Rights movement. How do these fit together? Adam says ‘you never know the connections between things, people, places, ideas. But there are connections.’ This is the premise the story based on, and I am in awe of the amazing feat of story-telling that Perlman has produced to tie it all together. Almost everything and everybody in the story relates to, or makes reference to, something or someone else. This could be seen as artificial, but I didn’t find it so. One tiny example suffices to illustrate this sort of referencing: the daughter of Adam’s boss at Columbia (whose father was a friend of his father) is speaking to her mother, (who is Lamont’s cousin, though she hasn’t seen him for many years) about a book she is supposed to be reading for school. ‘It sucks … It’s boring and … unrealistic.’ What is the book? Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the great American realist classic set in the slaughterhouses of Chicago.

History, then, is central to the story. Early in the book, Adam asks his students: ‘What is History’? ‘With the facts you know are solid underneath you,’ he says, ‘build a bridge to the unknown. Is this true, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or is there not enough known to you to say?’ Though this book is fiction, a lot of it is based on what is true, and a lot more on what is likely to be true. A number of the characters are either real people or based on real people; the book is dedicated to eight women, four Jewish, four African American, ‘who all died from different manifestation of the same disease’ – racism.

But being fiction, Perlman invokes another category: the imaginative recreation of what might have happened. What the imagined historian Adam discovers could have been true; it is fiction based on the spirit of what actually happened rather than any of his more precise historical categories. In the story, the imagined ex-prisoner Lamont Williams is the source of an account of real events he has learned about from a Jewish ex-inmate of Auschwitz; that never happened, and the historical account he reports is known from other sources. But Lamont is also true to the spirit of what happened; he is ‘desperate for people to remember other people.’ In this, he is unconsciously echoing the plea of the Jews of Auschwitz-Birkenau to ‘tell everybody what happened here’, a plea at the heart of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and of this book.

You can see from the sort of history being covered here, which, by the way is beautifully researched, that much of the book is very grim. The personal relationships of most of the characters are not happy either. So why did I keep going? It was partly the compelling interest of both the story and the characters, and the urge to know what would happen next. I think I also felt some kind of a duty to the victims of this history. Who could refuse to hear when they cry ‘tell everybody what happened here’? I also took heart from the book’s epigram from Ana Akhmatova: ‘Mountains bow down to this grief … But hope keeps singing from afar’.

Elliot Perlman is the son of second-generation Jewish Australians, and he grew up in Melbourne. You can read more about him here. This is his third novel, and he has a book of short stories. His second novel, Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2004. It was beaten by The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard – no disgrace there. But for a novelist that one French literary magazine has called ‘one of the 50 most important writers in the world’, he seems strangely little known in Australia.

The history in this book is fascinating, if horrifying. You can read more about the Little Rock Nine here, the Packinghouse Workers Organising Committee here, the history of wire recorders here and the Sonderkommando revolt here. It is interesting that the publicity around the publication of the book also contributed to finding evidence relevant to one of the historical disputes that is important in the story; for the dispute, see here, and for Perlman’s disclosure of the new evidence on it in 2012, see here. Will it resolve the dispute? ‘One wonders,’ he writes, ‘whether there are still some people for whom the eyewitness testimonies of African-Americans and of Polish Jews are not enough.’